A Governance Framework Implementation for Supply Chain Management Applications as Open Multi-Agent Systems

Governance means that specifications are enforced dynamically at application run-time. Governance framework is a technique to design and implement an extensible interaction specification for a family of open systems. This specification can be refined for particular applications. We based this proposal on object-oriented framework concepts and adapted them for distributed agents and interactions. A governance framework structures the extensions of open system instances as variations in interactions among agents, defined as templates. Templates are used to gather core implementation and extension points. Extension points are “hooks” that will be customized to implement an instance of the governance framework. During framework instantiation, templates are refined to concrete interaction specification. As a proof of concept experiment, in this paper we propose a framework for instantiating supply chain management applications as open systems.